Top 10 IT News Stories of the Week: Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent
Fri, February 23, 2007
CIO —
1) "Microsoft Must Pay Lucent-Alcatel $1.5B, Jury Says"
CIO.com, Feb. 23
A U.S. federal jury ordered Microsoft to pay Lucent-Alcatel $1.5 billion in damages for infringing on MP3 encoding and decoding patents. Some news reports said the fine was the largest ever in a patent lawsuit, though the companies wouldn’t confirm that. But the jury award is certainly one of the largest in such a dispute. In 2003, when Lucent-Alcatel was still just Lucent Technologies, it filed suit against Microsoft customers Dell and Gateway, alleging those companies infringed on 15 patented technologies through use of the Windows client OS. Microsoft got a declaratory judgment from the U.S. District court in San Diego saying it should be the lawsuit target and not its customers. A judge threw out two of the patent cases and divided the remaining 13 patent-infringement claims into six groups. This week’s jury verdict was the first trial, with five remaining.
2) "Apple, Cisco Come to Terms in iPhone Dispute,"
CIO.com, Feb. 22
Apple and Cisco won’t go to court over their dispute of rights to use the iPhone name. They agreed that both of them can use it. They’ll also "explore opportunities" to interoperate their security and communications technologies for consumer and business users. Cisco sued Apple last month in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California claiming Apple was infringing on its iPhone trademark. Cisco said it obtained iPhone rights when it bought Infogear in 2000. Cisco’s Linksys division already sells dual-mode cordless phones called iPhone.
3) "Google Apps Upgrade Poses Threat to Microsoft Office,"
CIO.com, Feb. 22
Google rolled out a major fee-based upgrade of its hosted suite for businesses of all sizes, called Google Apps, which is widely believed to be a serious competitor for Microsoft Office. For $50 per user per year, Google offers guaranteed uptime, IT management tools, technical support, increased storage, integration with word processing and spreadsheet applications, and BlackBerry support for Gmail. Google Apps Premier Edition is the third and most sophisticated version of the software suite that the company has released since it debuted its hosted service last August.
4) "Microsoft, AT&T Head to Supreme Court: What Does It Mean?"
Network World, Feb. 21
It was a busy bicoastal week in court for Microsoft. Besides the California patent case filed by Lucent-Alcatel, it presented oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a patent-infringement lawsuit filed by AT&T. The complicated case involves an AT&T patent for converting speech to computer code that Microsoft acknowledges it violated, but the company argues that it isn’t guilty of patent infringement on software shipped overseas. AT&T says that Microsoft violated a provision of patent law that prevents companies from shipping parts to be assembled overseas in a way that infringes on a U.S. patent. The companies have already settled on AT&T’s claim that the patent was infringed in the United States, so the Supreme Court case is to decide whether software is a component of the AT&T patent and whether Microsoft is a supplier to foreign computer makers. It must determine that both are the case to find Microsoft in violation. If that happens, the ruling could alter the software industry and how it operates as far as shipping components overseas for assembly, potentially costing vendors billions of dollars, experts say. AT&T has won judgments in district and appeals courts in the matter.
